SOURCE: Mellard, James M. “Academia and the Wasteland: Bernard Malamud's A New Life and His Views of the University.” In The American Writer and the University, edited by Ben Siegel, pp. 54-67. Newark, Del.: University of Delaware Press, 1989.

In the following essay, Mellard argues that A New Life is both an academic novel and a pastoral.

Bernard Malamud's A New Life (1961) has been labeled many things—a Western and a “travesty western,” a proletarian and a frontier novel.¹ It may be read as any one of these types. Still, each reading has to be perceived through the frame provided by the book's most dominant generic form—that of the academic novel. Though the Great American Novel will probably never be an academic novel, A New Life, whatever else it may suggest, certainly belongs to that genre. But it may be argued that neither Malamud nor any other novelist...